Oxford professor and author Viktor Mayer-Schönberger joins Economist data editor and commentator Kenneth Cukier to deliver insight into the hottest trend in technology. "Big data" makes it possible to instantly analyze and draw conclusions from vast stores of information, enabling revolutionary breakthroughs in business, health, politics, and education. But big data also raises troubling social and privacy concerns sure to be a major talking point in the years ahead.

A Simple Introduction to Data Science

Lars Nielsen and Noreen Burlingame provide a brief, understandable, user-friendly guide to all aspects of Data Science. The authors address the various skills required, the key steps in the Data Science process, software technology related to the effective practice of Data Science, and the best rising academic programs for training in the field.

The Intelligent Web: Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data

As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for. And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion.

Big data - the enormous amount of data that is created as virtually every movement, transaction, and choice we make becomes digitized - is revolutionizing business. Offering real-world insight and explanations, this audiobook provides a roadmap for organizations looking to develop a profitable big data strategy...and reveals why it's not something they can leave to the I.T. department. Think Bigger is an essential resource for anyone who wants to ensure that their company isn't left in the dust.

Taking up where the best-selling A Simple Introduction to Data Science, left off, Lars Nielsen's A Simple Introduction to Data Science, Book 2 expands on elementary concepts introduced in the first volume while at the same time embracing several new and key topics.

The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits

The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors, and Boost Profits makes the case that big data is for real, and more than just big hype. The audiobook uses real-life examples - from Nate Silver to Copernicus, and Apple to Blackberry - to demonstrate how the winners of the future will use big data to seek the truth.

The Internet of Things: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

The Internet of Things is a networked world of connected devices, objects, and people. In this book Samuel Greengard offers a guided tour through this emerging world and how it will change the way we live and work. Greengard explains that the Internet of Things (IoT) is still in its early stages. Smartphones, cloud computing, RFID (radio-frequency identification), technology, sensors, and miniaturization are converging to make possible a new generation of embedded and immersive technology.

Simply put, Dark Data is stored, largely non-inventoried, unstructured data not currently used for the purpose of conducting data science, but which is nevertheless maintained on a "just in case" basis - either to meet regulatory requirements, or in the hope that the data will prove useful for research purposes at some time in the future.

Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics

Welcome to the age of data. No matter your interests (sports, movies, politics), your industry (finance, marketing, technology, manufacturing), or the type of organization you work for (big company, nonprofit, small start-up) - your world is awash with data. As a successful manager today, you must be able to make sense of all this information. You need to be conversant with analytical terminology and methods and able to work with quantitative information. This audiobook promises to become your "quantitative literacy" guide.

Coal, iron ore, and oil were the key productive assets that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Today data is the vital raw material of the information economy. The explosive abundance of this digital asset, more than doubling every two years, is creating a new world of opportunity and challenge. Data-ism is about this next phase, in which vast, Internet-scale data sets are used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. It is a journey across this emerging world with people, illuminating narrative examples, and insights.

Unicorns Among Us: Understanding the High Priests of Data Science

In Unicorns Among Us, Lars Nielsen lays out the brief history of data science since its beginnings not long ago in this century. He as well explores the evolution of the role of the data scientist through this same period, and explores the best qualifications, the tools, the techniques, and the training involved in the practice of this arcane discipline.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World

It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills - and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These "bots" started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.

Behind Every Good Decision: How Anyone Can Use Business Analytics to Turn Data into Profitable Insight

List the hottest buzzwords in business today and "analytics" is bound to come out near the top. But to most people, analytics implies complex tools and technical experts manipulating massive amounts and varieties of information (i.e.,"Big Data"). But complex Big Data analytics isn't the only game in town. And many people don't realize that a business doesn't need data scientists and complex tools to derive useful information and valuable benefits from any amount of raw data.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies — with hardware, software, and networks at their core — will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human.

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you'll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

Social media is but one of five converging forces that promise to change virtually every aspect of our lives. You know these other forces already: mobile, data, sensors and location-based technology. Combined with social media they form a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends. Armed with that knowledge our personal devices can anticipate what we'll need next and serve us better than a butler or an executive assistant. The resulting convergent superforce is so powerful that it is ushering in an era the authors call the Age of Context.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things

We are now standing at the precipice of the next transformative development: The Internet of Things. Soon, connected technology will be embedded in hundreds of everyday objects we already use: our cars, wallets, watches, umbrellas, even our trash cans. These objects will respond to our needs, come to know us, and learn to think on our behalf. David Rose calls these devices - which are just beginning to creep into the marketplace - Enchanted Objects.

Super Crunchers

Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new audiobook, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger - all by the time he was 30. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data.

Using a series of case studies as examples throughout, the audiobook describes the agility that comes from collaborative commerce, and provides key decision makers the implementation roadmap they need to build a successful business ecosystem.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

Scrum

By the man who helped invent the red-hot management process known as "Scrum", Scrum unveils what is wrong with the way we currently do work, and how a simple set of principles, applied in exactly the right sequence, can accelerate productivity and quality as much as 1200 percent. Scrum (which gets its name from the formation in rugby in which the whole team locks its arms to gain control of the ball) is the reason that Amazon can launch a new feature on its website every day.

Publisher's Summary

Oxford professor and author Viktor Mayer-Schönberger joins Economist data editor and commentator Kenneth Cukier to deliver insight into the hottest trend in technology. "Big data" makes it possible to instantly analyze and draw conclusions from vast stores of information, enabling revolutionary breakthroughs in business, health, politics, and education. But big data also raises troubling social and privacy concerns sure to be a major talking point in the years ahead.

If you don’t know anything about big data, this might be a fine introduction to the subject, but for those who have not been living under a rock this was pretty light stuff. Big Data is a survey and brief history of big data, how it is being, and will be, used and finally some warnings about how big data could be abused. There are a few examples of how big data has been used effectively but there is not much in the way of details or deep analysis. The one exception was a lot of words spent worrying about big data and punishing people based upon predictions and the possible loss of personal responsibility and accountability. This was a little hyped for me. I learned more about big data from reading the Wikipedia entry. This was nicely narrated and largely mildly interesting.

The book itself illustrates its points with good stories and examples. There's really not that much to the story. Data exist and were getting more of it. Tools for analyzing it exist and they are getting better. We will use the data to our advantage when available. A full book to tell that story wasn't necessary.

We have more data and better tools to analyze them then ever before. That alone doesn't make us special as the theme of the book seems to tell us. That's as true today as well as everyday for the last 400 years or so. A lot our previous ways of thinking about the world were limited by the amount of data we had and the tools we had to analyze that data. Now days, because of the data and tools available, the what (i.e. correlation) can be more important than the how (i.e. causation) and decisions can proceed based on just the correlation and not necessarily understanding the reason for the causation. That doesn't mean we can ignore the how, but we don't always have to understand the reasons behind things when we look at all the data and see the correlations pop out. This is a big theme of the book.

Every time you use a computer, scan your credit/debit card or loyalty card, or drive your car, Big Data is being collected about you - without your direct and specific permission and with no compensation to you. Big Data refers to the abundance of data that is collected on every person voluntarily and involuntarily, with and without their knowledge, every second of every day. It is available for relatively quick predictive analysis of just about everything we do. The abundance of data, its use and re-use, are transforming our world.Can Google predict an outbreak of the flu? Can a car detect that a thief is behind the wheel? Can Apple really tell our biometrics through the use of their earbuds? The amazing answer is – yes! By correlating data from one place with the data from another, and maybe even another, companies can form an accurate picture of your needs and wants and present them to you for purchase. One interesting correlation of this data is drawing on the unrelated behaviors of the web sites a person visits and their hobbies, with their insurance premium. Or connecting credit reports and consumer marketing data with a person’s higher risk of having high blood pressure. While collecting every bit of data about people seems invasive of our privacy, it saves lives and helps doctors treat people sooner. Analytics determined that preemies stabilize right before they encounter a crisis. I believe the recent revelation that our government has been collecting data of our phone calls is the latter element mentioned in the “burgeoning field” in the book as “network analysis,” where it is “possible to map, measure and calculate the nodes and links for everything from one’s friends on Facebook, to which court decisions cite which precedents, to who calls whom on their cellphones. Together these tools help answer non-causal, empirical questions.” Hurricanes can be predicted through the purchase of Pop-Tarts.Data is painlessly collected by “seeing” how many cell phones are traveling on a highway to show real-time traffic patterns, or how many cell phones are gathered together to determine how many people showed up for a protest. Even our Tweets are sold and used to “garner aggregate customer feedback” or see if a marketing campaign is working. The innocent act of providing pictures and news on Facebook (and other social media) so our family and friends can share our joy is a voluntarily act of giving up our privacy so business (and government) can benefit from our thoughts, our pleasures, and those we “follow.”Imperfect yet informative, Big Data’s usefulness has only just begun.

It was read to perfection, at a pace that made this sometimes incredible information, easier to grasp. I even set the reading rate faster than "1" many times, as it was written to be easily understood.

Once I started this book, it was really hard to stop. A good read about how the world is changing.

This books provides an excellent overview of big data and examples where it's affecting our lives. It explains the difference between between "digitalization" (e.g., electronically booking your travel) and "datafication" (e.g., analysis of past flight data to predict the potential and duration of delays). The analysis of all data in all its form (good and messy) provides unexpected results. For example, a flight is more likely to be delayed longer due to fog than snow. Computing power and new processing techniques are allowing businesses to apply big data in all kinds of areas. For example, Google was able to track the spread of 2009 flu in real time, whereas prior to that the CDC took weeks. Google compared the most common search terms with CDC data. And through testing hundreds of mathematical models, found a combination of search terms that strongly correlated with official data. Our own behavior contributes to the use of big data. When we purchase items from Amazon, all of that metadata is stored and crunched. You're given recommendations based on what you purchased and what others making that same purchase had purchased in addition to that.

The potential of big data is both incredible and scary. Imagine traffic on every road is available in real time based people's cell phone signal as they are driving. There will be some accurate data (e.g., people in cars on the road) and some messy data (e.g., someone walking or standing on the sidewalk). New processing techniques know how to pick out the right set of data. To what extent will data be collected and used for purposes that we never anticipated?

This was an interesting book about potential uses of new forms of data. It also includes many interesting stories and examples of data use in the past, present, and future. The book explains how data can be used in new ways to that will improve business and society. Massive amounts of data was once only captured by the Navy, Astronomers, and Scientists. Today, it is becoming a natural resource and is captured by nearly every business and by millions of devices around the world. With the emergence of social networking, reams of data have been stored about people and places. New data sources are starting to take shape. Data is now being captured by everything from home appliances to industrial machines. The harvesting, analyzing, reporting, and decision making that comes with these new forms of data is very exciting. This book is not for everyone, but as a software developer, I found this book to be very enjoyable.

Would you consider the audio edition of Big Data to be better than the print version?

I borrowed the book from library was enjoyable but quite dry and I did not finish reading it.

I really wanted to understand the what, why and how about Big Data, I turned to the audio version

It was 360 degrees entertainment. The most interesting and informative. The overall concept came alive and I am able to grasp the evolution of collecting, storing vast data. Full of insight.

Now I am going to buy the book in hard copy to use as reference and read the printed format to have a rock sold understanding Big Data.

What did you like best about this story?

History, background and lots of real life benefits fo Big Data especially N=ALLI love data, statisticis and analysis so this book is perfect for me.

What does Jonathan Hogan bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Good voice tone, engaging and lively.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The dark side of Big Data. Everything comes with a price, as long as we do not abuse the tool. Still I think the good over rides the not so good. Big Data is here to stay, we should enhanced it for overall good to bring peace and happiness to the world.

Any additional comments?

We need to have trust, love and care. Not everyone is bad just misguided. We also should respect one another's likes and dislikes.

The future will be defined by N = All data sets full of messy data for sure but the messiness can be overcome by volume. Making since out the the data exhaust that was once thought of as noise is where the value is gained. The amount of data continues to grow but new big data solutions allow for mining that data for true gems of knowledge laying beneath the data. Big Data grapples with the promise of this future as well as a cautionary tail of how this could lead to the Big Brother world Orwell warned us about.

Where does Big Data rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The criticism that this book is repetitive is a bit unfortunate. This is the history of "Big Data" and how it has worked its way into public health, experimental science, marketing, and finance. Anyone can listen to this book and understand it regardless of their background. It it less methodology and more theory. I learned a lot of valuable and interesting information.

I might listen to the first few chapters again to note down some of the examples and use them during my presentations.

What other book might you compare Big Data to, and why?

This is the first of the set of books that I am reading on Big Data.

Which character – as performed by Jonathan Hogan – was your favourite?

The story of the guy who joined Amazon to help people find books was very interesting.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes,but I was able to listen to this book in a week

Any additional comments?

This book demystifies Big Data and busts certain myths people may have about it. After reading the book you know what to expect from Big Data. May be a chapter on what to do next for people wanting to know more about Big Data and how to get started on it might have been helpful.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Amazon Customer

4/2/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Really enjoyed it. Very well put together."

Well structured. Well narrated. Some fascinating content. An excellent introduction to Big Data and its implications.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Trapti

1/5/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"GREAT perspective on Big Data"

What made the experience of listening to Big Data the most enjoyable?

Available on the go!

What did you like best about this story?

Great articulations and examples on Big Data

What about Jonathan Hogan’s performance did you like?

very clear and interesting (meaningful) voice modulation

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no.. 1 hr max per sitting.. did will exercising

Any additional comments?

Great way to learn about topics.. especially the free trial feature is good.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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